Listen to Bantam Billy here
Bantam Billy Perkins, that was the name his mates down the mine gave him, – my dad that is. Yes, he was small and a fighter- but not with his fists or guns – His life was both defined and distorted by struggle – struggle for a political ideal– and that’s what I’m going to tell you about.
I recorded dad back in the 80s but I’d left it to long – he was too old and the fire in his belly had lost its heat. I’ve sifted through these tapes but only bits of them are useable. They’ve sharpened my own memories though, and I’ve also had long chats with my sister Vera Potter, She’s 10 years older than me.
Now, my dad, Bill Perkins stood 4 foot 11 in his stocking feet – that’s only one and a half metres. Oh yes, he was a very short man and he had a small man’s fiery temper……but, if courage and principle were his measure, make no mistake – dad was 10 foot tall.
Where do I start, well it’s 1897 in northwest England – in Lancashire – and more precisely Farnworth, just outside Bolton. They’re one and the same really a kilometer or so apart – concrete and asphalt right through.
Anyway, Farnworth was home to Sarah Jane and John Perkins. She worked in a cotton mill and he toiled away down a coal mine. Dad came along on the 10th of September 1897 he was the first of 3 children. Now, just imagine a long line of double-storied workers’ houses, they’re built of red brick but they’ve been blackened by layers of soot from the forest of mill chimneys all around. Some of these stacks have been spewing out coal smoke since the industrial revolution – so it’s no wonder the place is filthy, even washing on the line turns grey.
Now, taking a broader view, there’s no doubt that the alliance of cotton and coal drove the industry of England’s northwest – an unholy alliance dad used to say, and that’s hard to argue with because coal and cotton showed up some of the worst aspects of capitalism. Why, you say? Well, the mills and the mines were hungry for workers when times were good but, when the demand for cotton or coal dropped away, then thousands were left unemployed- scratching a living as best they could to keep out of the poor house.
That’s just a thumbnail sketch of the conditions dad was born into. But it helps explain why he became politically aware at a very early age. Now, at the end of the street where he lived stood an open-air market and every Sunday morning it attracted left wing political groups. The two main ones were the Independent Labour Party, – how would you describe them – a fairly idealistic crowd ,you might say – and also the British Socialist Party, now they were more hard- headed and Marxist – Anyway, orators from both parties would get out their soapboxes and start auctioning their political views to the crowds at the market. Dad spent hours down there soaking up their rhetoric like a sponge – and remember, he’s only in his early teens. Then he’d rush off to Farnworth library to track down the books they recommended. By thirteen he’d finished school but he went to night classes and reading became his passion – Charles Dickens, American socialist Jack London, and of course the German political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – he devoured them all.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that by the time the first world war broke out in 1914, dad had rejected the more moderate labour party and gone overboard for Marxism. Dad was inspired by the better life for working people that Marx promised with the overthrow of the capitalist system. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ – how many times did I hear him intone those words over the years. For dad this was far more than a Marxist slogan it summed up what was possible under a communal or communist system. And he’d only to look around at the conditions he lived and worked in to see the dire need for change.
Dad was still in his early teens, when he joined his father in the mine, I must say, much against his mother’s wishes. And Sarah Jane had good reason not to want ‘her Billy’, as she called him, working at the coalface. It was hard, dirty dangerous drudgery. You see, New Zealand coal seams could be – oh, 30 feet thick but coal seams in Lancashire were often very narrow -sometimes a miner had to pick and shovel on his knees or at best stooped low. There were no bathhouses at the mine and no bath at home; they had to make do with a swill over the sink to wash away the worst of the coal dust blackening their faces. But looming over everything was the ever-present threat of mine gas explosions. You see, In the latter half of the 19 century, mine tunnels were spreading out much further from the central shaft and mine owners were reluctant to front up with the money to install costly ventilation. This led to thousands being killed by explosions caused by gas build-ups. It may be hard to believe, but in the period between 1900 and the first World War, dad remembered three disasters which in total took the lives of about one thousand men. The worst was in south Wales and killed well over 400 – yes, 400 in one mine. Then a pit near where dad worked exploded and upwards of 200 died. The same in a Shropshire mine and there were similar disasters up and down Britain.
In the early stages of World War 1, miners were regarded as essential workers and weren’t expected to join up. But of course, as the war wore on, losses soared and the government response was conscription. Miners were subjected to a kind of watered down conscription called ‘combing’. The idea was to ‘comb out’ some of the younger men for military service without severely depleting the mine workforce. About two years into the conflict, dad was ‘combed’ – but he refused his call-up. Well, the response was what you might call swift and decisive. Dad returned home from the mine to find the police waiting to arrest him. It’s often the little things that stick in your mind at times like this. Dad recalled seeing his dinner steaming on the table and feeling ravenous after a hard day underground but they wouldn’t let him eat it. They marched him off to appear before a magistrate who handed him over to the military and he was held in the local barracks; – he was 18 or 19.
For several days, the military tried to persuade dad to don the King’s uniform, which was a kind of symbolic way of getting him under military law but he’d have none of it. They also paraded him in front of newly drafted soldiers from his neighborhood to try and shame him into joining up but dad remained staunch. He felt that they underestimated him, thinking that someone under 5 foot would be easily cowed by a bevy of 6 foot drill sergeants.
In fact, the more they tried to break him the more defiant he became. And he even got cocky enough to throw back a few well-chosen mouthfuls about the war being a natural outcome of capitalist imperialism, and workers should take no part in it. He also accused his captors of being the lackeys of their capitalist masters and prolonging the slaughter in the trenches. Well, no wonder his mates called him ‘Bantam Billy’.
Needless to say, dad’s bravura performances didn’t help his case one bit. He was sentenced to two years hard labour and jailed in Wormwood Scrubs just outside London. On the train journey down, one of his guards quietly confessed his admiration for dad’s stand, and said he wished he had the same courage. Back home to, quite a few were impressed by dad’s resistance to conscription One former workmate told dad’s mother that at heart he was a pacifist but he just couldn’t summon up the courage to refuse his call-up. He never returned from France. When dad first told me that about a third of his former classmates died at the front or returned with limbs missing and lungs seared by mustard gas, I thought he must’ve been exaggerating but I should have known better, he wasn’t given to stretching the truth. And sure enough, I found that losses like this weren’t at all uncommon.
Throughout his life people who didn’t know his history very well would refer to dad as a conscientious objector, but he would wag his finger and proclaim …’I was never a religious pacifist, I refused the uniform on political grounds: I was a socialist objector and proud of it.’
‘Hard labour’ at Wormwood Scrubs turned out to be little more than sewing stiff canvas for mail bags and other equipment, child’s play compared with work down the mine. The commonly nicknamed ‘conchies’ were held in a separate building from the criminals. It was to avoid cross-infection, dad used to joke, the authorities weren’t sure who they feared most: pacifist criminals, or criminal pacifists.
Conditions were humane enough; inmates were allowed books, even socialist literature. But the rule dad found hardest to stick to was not talking in the exercise yard. He just couldn’t get good enough at talking out of the side of his mouth and he often got thrown into solitary confinement for a day or two on nothing but bread and water. In his cell he used to gaze at the stars through the window bars. He told me how he gained solace from their constancy and by thinking that they would still be shining down when jail and the war were long gone. It’s hardly surprising that one of dad’s favourite poems was Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, written after Wilde had served a term in Reading prison in 1895.
At last I saw the shadowed bars
….Like a lattice wrought in lead,
Move right across the whitewashed wall
….That faced my three-plank bed,
And I knew that somewhere in the world
….God’s dreadful dawn was red.
I never saw sad men who looked
….With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
….We prisoners called the sky,
And at every careless cloud that passed
….In happy freedom by.
About a year or so into his sentence, dad decided to go on hunger strike in protest at his imprisonment. He drank a small amount of water and ate nothing. News of the war and the mood of the country filtered into Wormwood Scrubs; dad knew that the trenches were still running with blood with no quick end to the conflict in sight. The people of Britain were in sullen mood, especially the working classes and the left. Anger over the conduct of the war and its ever mounting losses was growing. The success of the Russian revolution had raised fears amongst the ruling classes that something similar might happen in Britain. The government and the capitalist system overthrown and troops refusing to fight – well -it might seem a bit far-fetched from this distance but at the time, given the exceptional circumstances created by the war, who could be sure? Dad never knew if the authorities soft-pedalled on him because of the ominous political climate, but a week into his hunger strike they released him and gave him a train ticket back to Lancashire. No one was more surprised than he was .He’d suffered no ill-effects from his fast and he walked out of Wormwood Scrubs with his spirits high. But he was soon brought back to earth by the hard realities in Lancashire.
By the time the war ended not much had improved on the industrial front. In fact, as far as the mines were concerned, the outlook was increasingly gloomy. 1921 saw confrontation after the government started to sell off state-run mines. 1921 also saw troops dispatched to maintain order at coalfields. Dad became increasingly bitter and disillusioned as he saw union leaders buckle under the pressure from government and owners. Miners suffered wage cuts of between 10 and 40%.
All this, combined with the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia, confirmed dad’s communism. He saw the moderate left and their attempts at negotiation and reconciliation as selling out the working class. He married my mother, Edna Margaret Shepherd, in 1925. Edna had been brought up in a Farnworth fish and chip shop. She was a cheerful, warm hearted woman and, like dad, had left school at an early age, but unlike him she hadn’t continued her education at night school. She went along with dad’s beliefs but was never impassioned by politics in the way he was. Over the years she would pay a high price for marrying a communist. Dad’s spurning of the moderate left was already setting a course for the future. He was intelligent, well-read, a good speaker. He would’ve had little trouble finding a place in the ranks of the Labour party, but he’d have none of it. In his eyes, they were traitors to the working class.
A year after Dad’s marriage came the climax of Britain’s post war class struggle, the General Strike of May 1926. Dad threw himself into the strike with his usual enthusiasm, he was always in the vanguard of protests and demonstrations.
The Strike ended in defeat for the national body, the Trade Union Congress, 10 days later, – but the miners hung on for several months before the inevitable return to work for lower pay and longer hours.
For dad the General Strike’s legacy was confirmation of the duplicity of Labour and the unions. It also left him with a hatred of Winston Churchill for bringing machine guns onto the streets trained on demonstrating workers.
Dad’s frustration and disillusion with industrial Britain now took on a different hue. He’d discovered the writings of socialist reformers Beatrice and Sydney Webb, who’d glowingly described New Zealand as a possible future socialist state. This prediction was based on their admiration of the reforms brought in by the Liberal government during the 1890s. Much of this social and industrial legislation was well in advance of the rest of the world. So, it was the Webbs, along with New Zealand’s better climate and the fact that he had relatives here that made up dad’s mind. In 1928 he and mum turned their backs on the discord and squalor of a polluted Lancashire to seek a new life halfway across the world.
Dad worked around rural Canterbury for a while helped by relatives, but farm work didn’t suit him and in 1929 the coal mines of the west coast lured him to Millerton. Mum and dad always said that some of the happiest times of their life were spent at Millerton, ‘on the hill’ as they termed it. The United Mine Workers Union, the UMW virtually ran Millerton. The UMW’s role extended well beyond meetings and negotiations; the Union raised money for good causes, organised picnics and socials and generally looked after the community. Dad was in his element, surrounded by like-minded men, almost all of them from the coalfields of Britain.
In spite of being an inch under 5 foot, dad was a keen soccer player and a member of the Millerton All Blacks, as they called themselves. And they had good claim to such an iconic name because this was no Sunday social team. The game was strongly supported and highly competitive amongst the mining settlements on the coast and in 1932 and 1933, the Millerton All Blacks were twice runners-up in the Chatham Cup, New Zealand’s premier knockout football competition.
By now the depression was biting deeply and miners on short weeks or without jobs were looking for financial help from from local authorities. Relief work and the dole hadn’t come in yet. Hard-pressed Millerton miners and many of their wives gathered in a park in Westport, that’s the Buller port 25 kilometres down the coast, they gathered to demand help from the Buller County Council who happened to be meeting in the Westport town hall behind locked doors. As you might imagine, exclusion from the meeting infuriated the Millerton folk and they charged the town hall and broke down the doors. Of course, dad was one of the leaders in the assault, but right beside him was a huge Lancashire woman. She dwarfed dad but did more to smash in the doors than the men did. Perhaps it was the affects of hunger, or excitement and physical exertion, whatever the reason, the poor woman fainted as the crowd poured into the town hall. It took several hefty miners to carry her to safety. The councilors were left in no doubt about the plight of those living ‘on the hill’ but dad couldn’t remember getting any help.
One prominent union figure dad rubbed shoulders with at Millerton was Angus McLagan, who later held several ministerial positions in the first Labour government. But in the early 30s, McLagan led the fight against what was called ‘tribute mining’. Tributors were small co-operative mines outside union control. McLagan feared that when the UMW called a strike, the coal bosses would weaken the union’s bargaining power by obtaining coal from these independent mines. As the depression deepened there were bitter tribute disputes at Blackball, Deniston and Charming Creek.
But Mclagan had a more fundamental battle on his hands. Pit closures and shortened working weeks were steadily eroding union membership. But you’ve got to hand it to the wily Scotsman, he pursued a dogged but cautious path which maintained the United Mine Workers Union more or less intact, and in 1934, he was able to launch a campaign that largely restored wage rates in the coal industry.
But all this was too late for dad. He lost his job and was forced onto relief work, much of it repairing roads severely damaged by the 1929 Murchison earthquake. He then received an invitation which must have come like a godsend. The communist party offered him a job in Wellington. It involved organising rallies, protests and generally taking the fight to the capitalists. So the Perkins family – now including my sister Vera born in 1931 – moved to the capital.
But Wellington was a far cry from the socialist-dominated West Coast. Gone was the tightly-knit, like-minded solidarity of Millerton. Instead dad found a weak and faction-ridden party, with little respect or support amongst working people, he was a fish out of water. The party was also penetrated by police spies. In dad’s view, the authorities overestimated the danger to good order posed by the communists, but nevertheless, so fierce were the attacks on the party that there was rarely a time when one or more of its leaders wasn’t in jail. In 1933, the whole Central Committee was imprisoned for six months.
Dad housed his family in a tiny attic flat at the top of Glenmore street hard by the Karori tunnel and walked each day into the city to the party rooms in Farish Street. There he conspired the overthrow of capitalism, albeit with conspicuous lack of success. It was a harrowing time for mum though. She was scared stiff every time there was a knock on the door because she expected the police with an arrest warrant for dad at any time but his luck held and he stayed out of jail. It wasn’t long though before his job with the beleaguered Communist Party evaporated and he was back on relief work.
Coming to Wellington was bad enough but dad now decided to make a move which proved far worse. Mum’s homesickness and unhappiness in Wellington would no doubt have had something to do with the return to England, and his brother in Lancashire had promised to find him a job. So in 1934, he packed mum and Vera onto the passenger ship Bendigo, but to save money, he signed on to the Port Alma as a bathroom steward. He had only hazy memories of the voyage around Cape Horn, infamous for its savage storms. Dad spent most of the time being sick in his cleaning bucket.
If only they’d hung on for another year or so, they’d have seen the first Labour government come to power and easing economic conditions. Things got better relatively quickly in New Zealand but in Britain, the depression ground on until World War 2. Most of the mates dad left behind in New Zealand had moved into secure jobs and a state house well before the war. If he’d stayed, there was nothing to prevent him from doing the same. Back in England, his brother’s job promise came to nothing and he faced another six years of unemployment. He didn’t get steady work till 1940 when the war created a manpower shortage; he’d been almost ten years without a secure job.
Not long after returning to Farnworth the family was allocated a council house. This was the only bright spot in a very dreary picture. Dad, of course, was unemployed but the District Nurse used to get mum odd bits of work looking after sick people and babies. It paid next to nothing but it was enough to prevent dad from getting the full dole which was severely means tested. Instead, he received what was called a transitional allowance which was less than the unemployment benefit. Both mum and dad would pick up a few shillings here and there through undeclared work. Dad once helped demolish a house and came home infested with fleas.
Under-the-table payments for the odd bit of work was the target of a much-feared and resented official known as the Transitional Man. He snooped around the neighborhood on the look out for anyone supposedly double-dipping. He also had the right to enter and search homes to assess whether so-called ‘expensive’ belongings should be sold and offset against the dole. He once went through mums kitchen drawers. ‘How can you afford cutlery like this’, he demanded? This got under mum’s skin and she indignantly told him the truth: ‘it was a wedding present’.
Sister Vera, only six or seven at the time, vividly remembers how she was thoroughly instructed about what to say to the Transitional Man about mum and dad’s whereabouts if they were out earning unofficially. One time, she was swinging on the front gate when he popped up. ‘I’ve called before and your mother’s always out’, he accused, glaring suspiciously. Vera politely told him that her mother was looking after a sick friend, but she didn’t tell him that mum was getting a few bob on the side for her nursing. Some of mum’s friends were quite well-off and would give her bits and pieces, mostly clothes. Someone once gave her a fur coat. It was a bit worn and moth-eaten but it sent the Transitional Man up the wall. But even he had to admit that it wouldn’t sell for much. So mum proudly kept herself warm through the long, severe winters with her hand-me-down fur coat.
Of course, dad had joined the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement which had been formed to combat the excesses of the means test, organize hunger marches and draw attention to the plight of the unemployed. Dad took part in several hunger marches in the mid-1930s. Many within the wider labour movement in Britain were dismayed when Labour and official trades union bodies offered little support to the legions of unemployed. Of course, this didn’t surprise dad one bit. The Trades Union Congress even advised trades councils along the route of the famous Jarrow hunger march down to London in 1936 not to help the marchers, although many local branches did give aid.
Dad loved cycling and he combined leisure with practicality by riding his bike as far down as the Midlands in search of work; he often got a flat tyre but never a job. He found nothing permanent until 1940, the year I was born. With younger men away at the war, work was becoming available and he was able to pick up a job at the Farnworth Co-operative Society driving a van. It wasn’t well paid but a regular income, however modest, made a huge difference. Dad neither smoked nor drank and gave his wages to mum. He’d spare no effort to better his family: I remember him clipping hedges and mowing lawns to get extra money for my piano lessons. Towards the end of the war I can recall frugality but no shortage of essentials: we ate well and were adequately clothed. The hard times were over.
But for mum, deprivation of a different kind lingered on. Her 20-year marriage to a hard-line communist had robbed her of many friends and even some of her relatives shunned her because of dad . If he sensed any challenge or disrespect for his beliefs he was instantly and fearlessly outspoken. There were never any beg-your-pardons in his outbursts. I remember a bus trip when some unsuspecting passenger slighted the Soviet Union. Dad’s volcanic response turned heads, including the driver’s who brought the crowded vehicle to a halt while things calmed down. But we were soon under way again. That was the one saving grace: dad’s anger displays were spectacular but usually short lived.
A good friend of Dad’s from the Millerton days corresponded regularly and painted a rosy picture of life in New Zealand under the first Labour government, and by the late 1940s mum and dad decided to return to the country they should never have left. Vera emigrated in 1949 and the rest of us joined her the following year. By this time, Labour had lost power but the wool boom was beginning, the country was wealthier than ever before, and dad had no trouble getting work in Wellington minding buses at the Road Services garage.
From my viewpoint, coming back to New Zealand was the best move the Perkins ever made. I thrived in the climate and outdoor environment and gained a college and university education which would have been closed to me in Britain. I was a slow developer and would never have made it to Grammar School by passing the entrance exams when I was only eleven.
Vera joined the Young Communist League when she first arrived back in New Zealand but soon let her membership lapse. We both went along with Dad’s political beliefs in our teenage years, although he never thrust them down our throat, but later we came to question his brand of socialism. He’d pass on Soviet newspapers and magazines to me but a diet of beaming Ukrainian women driving tractors and praising the latest Five Year Plan contributed little to my political understanding.
During the 1950s and 60s, as former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s murderous excesses became undisputed, I’d have long arguments with dad, but he’d never budge from his support for the Soviet Union. He’d often dismiss facts as capitalist propaganda. The terrible cost in lives of Russia’s conversion from a peasant to an industrial economy between the wars, for example. He insisted that this was grossly exaggerated by the west. But he also firmly believed that Soviet industrial development had been necessary, because Stalin knew that sooner rather than later the fascist-capitalists would attack from the west, and of course that’s what happened when Hitler declared war on the Soviet Union. He interpreted the cold war in a similar way: – the capitalist west was out to defeat in any way they could the progressive Soviet-led countries of eastern Europe. He admitted that life was far from perfect for workers behind the Iron Curtain but Utopia lay somewhere in the future and only Moscow-style communism could lead to its realization.
As he grew older, dad’s temper mellowed but, if anything, his politics became more ossified. He was an atheist, but communism was his religion with its tenets set in stone. After my mother died in 1975, dad turned more inward and buried himself in Soviet literature. His greatest fear was that his failing eyesight would soon prevent him from reading.
Dad was now in his late eighties and his old comrades were rapidly dying off. He lived in Porirua and would walk several kilometres to Titahi Bay to call on Ken Douglas, who was then head of New Zealand’s trade union organisation the Federation of Labour and a communist. Ken was kind to dad, he must have been busy, but he still found time to discuss politics with him which dad found stimulating. He may have mellowed but dad was still capable of a barb or two. I recall him once returning from a visit to Ken’s and complaining about the Douglas’s unkempt front garden. ‘Here he is, the country’s most important union official, and he doesn’t keep his lawns mowed. It reflects badly’, he said, shaking his head.
Dad died in 1995. He was 98. He became senile in his early 90s and in a way, senility came as a blessing: it meant that he was unaware of the fall of the Soviet Union. He would have found the regime’s collapse unbearable. Barely out of boyhood his coal-mining mates had called him Bantam Billy and all his life he’d fought to realise his communist ideals – ideals that were first nurtured by the socialist orators in Farnworth market over 80 years ago. I’m so glad he was spared seeing his dreams shattered.
